Relics of Eternity
by Jessa L'Rynn
Summary: There is a long history between them, the truth of it hidden in the pages of Time long passed. Where even memory is lost, only remnants survive, tribute to a forever unrealized. Everything has its time. Especially this.
1. Myth and Missing

A/N: The sequel to "A Long History". This story has many parts, every one related to every other one, even if they may seem disjointed at first glance. Bring your thinking caps and don't forget to let me know if you have questions. For those just tuning in: I do not support the "Lungbarrow" hypothesis. My thanks and heart-felt adoration to **Olfactory_Ventriloquism** for beta-reading.

_My 50th story on this site, published New Year's Day, 2009, five years after I started here._

Disclaimer: I own Doctor Who in an Alternate Universe. This ISN'T an Alternate Universe.

* * *

**Relics of Eternity**

_Chapter 1: Myth and Missing_

The Watch was a myth, purported to be kept in the Central Headquarters of the Time Agency. Within the Watch, so rumor said, was a beating heart, the soul of Time itself. The Watch was reputed to be powerful, a thing of temporal grace and beauty, and it kept the Agency capable of functioning. According to legend, the Watch, not the Time Agents, could see everything that was, is, and ever could be.

Central Command encouraged belief in the Watch as a mythology. However, to all official communication, it was only that, a myth, not something that had ever existed or ever would. Young recruits to the Agency learned of it from veterans and so the legend persisted.

As the Agency spread across space (and consequently across time), they began to be quite selective in their recruitment. Every recruit had to have some sort of personal strength that would benefit the Agency. The 'Foreign Legion' of by-gone eras was no longer the way of the modern selection process. The young, homeless boy from the Boeshane Peninsula was no exception. He was maybe twelve years old when he first caught the Agency's attention, when he survived an attack by the most vicious creatures imaginable, an attack that decimated the colony and left the living wishing for death.

His father had been among the victims of the brutal assault, his brother among the missing. His mother had, apparently, lost her mind, for she made absolutely no move to stop her oldest child when he walked, alone, along the invasion route, checking every body, searching for his lost brother. He never stopped walking, except to run. When the Time Agents decided to stop watching him and bring him in, he was half-dead from dehydration, half-cooked from constant exposure, and half-mad from desperation.

He should have been easy to round up. He was an astoundingly hearty child to have survived such extremes for five solid days, but he was still just a child. So when he vanished right under their watchful eyes as they approached him, they knew they had chosen wisely. They also knew they had their work cut out for them.

It took them more than three years, with no more than occasional sightings, to finally round the child up. He was waiting for them, they had to suppose, in the city, keeping company with an extremely alien visitor to the Peninsula, the famously ancient Face of Boe.

The Face was willing to turn him over to them, if and only if the boy was willing to go. They brought a reader in to try to change the child's mind, if necessary, but they had to assume that the Face was protecting him, because the reader could find no safe entrance into the child's mind.

He was willing, he said, to go with them. He had to find his brother, and being stuck on the Peninsula was going to do him no good in such a search. They agreed to let him attempt the task in free time between his missions, neglecting to mention that he'd be lucky to ever discover a free moment for the rest of his probably very short life.

Once he had been properly lauded and feted for joining up, the beautiful child whose charming face would make future recruitment here impossibly easy, they took him to Headquarters and started the customary procedures. They drugged him first to within an inch of his life, and found him, surprisingly, one hundred percent full-blood human. Full-blood humans were so rare by the fifty-first century that they could make a fortune selling their biologicals on the black market.

They took his clothing and his meager possessions and sent them to the labs to double check. The only thing omitted in this procedure was the fob watch they found hanging from a chain around the child's neck. It, and the key hanging with it, were sent directly to High Command and they disappeared into the bureaucratic and temporal ether almost immediately.

They sourced and traced his time line and found it masked and shrouded. Still, the Agency stamp went on it with ease, so they let the anomaly pass without comment. They still couldn't find a telepath strong enough to read the boy's mind. There were all kinds of space stories told about people whose minds were closed to outsiders, everything from dark futures of people who were dead inside, to strange myths about ancient races who marked their mates in a way that closed the marked person's mind forever.

They ignored all of this in favor of blaming the Face of Boe, who was reputed to be powerfully telepathic.

Because the Time Agency dealt in the prerogatives of a race that was ancient and only existed now in rumor and hearsay, they had a few customs that were inexplicable but always followed to the letter. One of those things was the hardest to complete, and the more shielded the mind of the recruit, the more difficult the procedure became.

Legend had it that the Time Lords hid their names, or maybe it was only the one Time Lord who appeared to still exist, at least periodically. Either way, the Time Agency liked the idea of the custom, so every Agent was re-christened prior to training. All memory of the boy's given name was wiped from his mind. They called him, thereafter, the Face of Boe, after his benefactor and his home world, until such time as he could complete his training and be assigned a short, common moniker to base his future nom de guerre upon. He was, after all, an uncommonly beautiful child, and his face would be perfect for recruitment drives on many worlds.

The Face was extremely clever, as they learned almost immediately. He was supremely physically fit. He was quick with weapons and astonishing with people. He could, with his face and his words, charm anyone at all into doing nearly anything he wished them to do.

He was, in short, a born leader and destined to live a very fast, very chaotic life and die a quick, glorious, and heroically tragic death.

His greatest asset to the Agency wasn't discovered until his very first field training mission, but when it was found, every field agent in the place fought for the opportunity to partner with the boy. Even mysterious members of the High Command came down to meet him, just to see this skill in action.

The human child from the backwater Boeshane Peninsula was time-sensitive.

They promoted him to proper Agent status the next day and, because he was so good at everything he set his hand to, they called him Jack.

* * *

Jack was called back to Central to receive his promotion to Captain, and he was extremely grateful. No one had ever told him before that you remembered the stuff you did when stuck in a time loop. In the debriefing, in fact, the scientists insisted that neither he nor Captain John should have remembered a damn thing, and put their six years of remembered torment (and some really great sex) down to Jack's abnormal time sensitivity.

John hadn't been amused by the fact that Jack didn't really want to see him again. He'd just spent six solid years with the man, for gods' sake, and Jack thought they both deserved a break. The recall to Central happened just in time, because John was a sociopath and he usually got what he wanted. John didn't have a conscience to prevent him, in any way, from doing whatever he had to do to get it. The Time Agency considered it an asset, and sent John on missions no one else would have dreamed of taking.

Jack had a conscience, and it was considered his only weakness, because it was strong. He wouldn't kill unless he had no choice, and he very often refused to use weapons when there was some other way to do what he needed to get done. He absolutely refused to disturb the time lines as he perceived them and, since he was so much more temporally cognizant than any of his colleagues, he occasionally found himself having to stop what was thought to be a routine mission because it was a fixed event instead.

They tolerated him, though, because he was liked by many people and because his time sense made him almost invaluable when no one knew exactly what had to be done to effect the event properly. And now, they were promoting him to full Captain, meaning he was capable of working independently and even training others. He expected he might end up doing a lot of training, because he had ways of making gadgetry to answer the questions his time sense couldn't do, and that was a talent that benefitted the entire Agency.

Walking through the halls of Central Headquarters, Jack slowly became aware of something very strange. There was singing and whispering, a voice like he'd never heard before, and yet it sounded so familiar. It was an important voice, he thought, full of concern and pride and longing and hope. It reminded him, in a way, of his father's voice, although he rarely allowed himself to think on that.

The singing sounded like... it reminded him of his mother, which was odd, because she'd never sung a note in her life, not even to Grey... Jack shoved the memories out of the way, back to where they were supposed to be buried.

Instead, unable to help himself, he followed the sounds of the voices and the song. Disregarding all instructions, he made his way deep into the labyrinthine corridors of Central, hardly noting the paths he followed.

Now, the voice was definitely calling him, not by his given name (which he couldn't actually remember, but liked to think he would recognize), but _'Jack'_. Occasionally, there were other words, deeper and stranger words... _'Doctor', 'Time Lord', 'Rose', 'TARDIS', 'forever'_... The words began to clang and ache inside his head, began to feel like he was not being summoned by some unidentifiable mystery, but being called home.

_'Home'_, the voice agreed, and then there were pictures, not of the vividly yellow half-desert on the Boeshane peninsula, but of other places, other times, other worlds. A room of coral and off-blue light with a door that led into stark white corridors and another that led to eternity, a disused railway station, something that looked for all the world like a London Council flat from the twenty-first century on Earth. A view of a beach and a weeping, golden girl abruptly conquered all the views, and Jack had just a split second to look on her, suddenly missing her terribly, when he'd never seen her before in his life. His heart was thundering and aching in his chest, before all of it was swept away. In it's place a view blossomed, a mountainous world with orange skies, silver trees sweeping up from crimson plains to turn to fire under doubled suns.

Jack had only ever seen such a place before in his dreams. His feet carried him onward now, with desperate, aching intensity. A door swept open and he was suddenly in a room that was full of the song. No, the Song.

_'Jack,_' the voice called him. _'Come home, Jack, come back to where you belong.'_

There were only two things in the entire room. One was a small, ordinary looking Yale key, but it was glowing brightly with golden, orange light. The other was... a Myth.

Lying, silent now, on the plinth before him, was a small, silver pocket watch. He stared at it, amazed and delighted and unsure what to do.

The voices whispered to him, a dozen voices that sounded so familiar he knew them as well as his own. '_Doctor,'_ they all called, loudly, and once, and then they all fell back to whispers. And then one spoke above all the others, a voice so beloved it brought tears to his eyes, an accent so human, he couldn't begin to understand. '_Take the Watch, Jack, and we'll go home.'_

Jack stared at it, torn by indecision and then, unable to help himself, his hand stretched out to touch it.

* * *

He woke, abruptly, wondering if he would be late to his meeting, and realized that two years had passed.


	2. Foundling

A/N: The sequel to "A Long History". This story has many parts, every one related to every other one, even if they may seem disjointed at first glance. Bring your thinking caps and don't forget to let me know if you have questions. For those just tuning in: I do not support the "Lungbarrow" hypothesis. My thanks and heart-felt adoration to **Olfactory_Ventriloquism** for beta-reading.

* * *

**Relics of Eternity**

_Chapter 2: Foundling_

Borusa was in the process of escorting the senior postulants out on their required learning exercise, when Flavia, one of his most promising young students, alerted him to a distress call. He entered the wooden and brass, affectatious old console room at a dead run because whatever it was that was making the call, it had distressed this old Type-40 enough that it had deigned to actually 'speak' to him.

It didn't exactly like him, this ship, but it was his usual preference for these learning exercises, because it had enormous memory and data storage capacity, very nearly as much as the Panatropic net itself. Even now, when the newest capsules of all were Type-53s, the Type-40 was probably the oldest time capsule on Gallifrey. At least one of its pilots had been utterly insane, if any of its interior dimensional behavior was anything to go by, and it also possessed the closest thing to a mind of its own that Borusa had ever seen evidenced by a capsule.

Right at that moment, the 'mind' of the machine was doing something very nearly like panicking inside his head. Even before he reached to initiate scans, it was already searching.

What it found made his hearts clench in his chest. There, drifting aimlessly at the edge of the Medusa system, was what looked very much like a shattered time capsule. Borusa instated quarantine protocols, found an area of the ship big enough to hold it without causing a recursive paradox, and materialized the Type 40 around the smaller, dead-looking little capsule.

They scanned it for life and found the most astonishing thing. Not only was the young capsule clinging desperately to its scattered existence, it was fighting to preserve the battered and fading life of a single, half-destroyed occupant.

That was all it took. Borusa cleared the quarantine fields, cleared the decks, and let the Type-40 sing soft encouragement to the younger, damaged ship. Meanwhile, he removed the survivor, a very young man of perhaps fifty Rassilon standard years, to the Med Bay.

This ship had been stocked with such equipment as would make the most highly trained and advanced healers weep. It was a thing of pure beauty, obviously one of the pilots' pride and joy. Someone had loved healing - a physician, a doctor? Who could know - the capsule was so old, its history was long since lost.

The boy - he was no more than a boy - had been horribly damaged by something. If Borusa had to guess, he would say the child had been forced, at such a young age, to regenerate. With his processes not complete, with his training so young and so new, it was a wonder the boy had survived at all, even as the shattered wreck of Gallifreyan and other physiology that lay, gasping, on the diagnostic bed before him.

He knew what he had to do - the child, whoever he was - had to take all precedence. He activated a stasis field, suspending the boy in time, and brought the ship on a line to return directly to Gallifrey.

The healers worked on him for two days, often despairing and surrendering, only to have the child drag himself back from the brink, almost as if to spite them. They rebuilt his body from the genetic level. He would never be as hearty and healthy as a Time Lord ought to be. He would be easier to damage, any body that he regenerated into somewhat more vulnerable to the things that a Time Lord should survive.

He was obviously a Time Lord, though. The mind, the neural connections in the brain, they were all well established, as if he'd crossed the third paradigm much younger than others. Aging him, though, had to be done by temporal wave. He was hardly more than thirty.

All in all, he was a miracle.

All attempts to find the boy's House were thwarted almost immediately, however. A simple scan revealed that he had no living relatives in any of the listings. It was rare but possible for Time Lords to have renouncers, who lived outside the system, as family, so that was one of two likely explanations. The other, that the boy had been utterly orphaned before being removed from Gallifrey, seemed somewhat preposterous.

Borusa watched from the sidelines, curiosity and a certain sense of responsibility compelling him to remain near to hand at least until the boy awoke, if he ever did. A colleague of his, an old rival from his own Academy days, also showed and took interest.

Cardinal Goth found the boy's persistent survival and lack of any known history to be utterly fascinating. It was the Cardinal, in fact, who gave the boy the name the whole healing staff used when referring to their amazing patient. Apparently, it was a legend from some backwater world in Mutter's spiral, which had amused the Cardinal enough to research it. The character in the legend was known as "the Deathless," and really, even Borusa had to admit that the name seemed apropos under the circumstances.

So they called him Koschei, until they had something better.

* * *

The first time he regained consciousness, the scene that occurred was something Borusa would never forget.

Flavia had come by with papers for Borusa to sign, and the Head of the Academy bent over his work while the girl went to visit with the unconscious child. It seemed she, too, felt some sense of responsibility for the boy, since she had discovered the initial signal. Borusa could never fault her gentle manner nor her firm sense of purpose and responsibility. He was almost absurdly proud of Flavia, if the truth were to be told.

She leaned over the boy's bed, to take a closer look at his pale, attractive face, when she suddenly gasped. Borusa looked up and watched them through the observation glass, realizing that the boy had taken her hand as she leaned over him.

For the first time, his eyes snapped open. They were grey, intense, frightened. The Rassilon Imprinitur was so utterly obvious that no one would have to question again if the boy really was a Time Lord - you just couldn't miss that. Flavia looked into those eyes, and the boy spoke, a gentle tone, slightly thready from disuse. "Who are you?" he asked.

"I'm called Flavia," she answered, her voice a little shaky from the surprise. No one but immediate family touched Time children his age - ever - and although she was a senior postulant herself, this was probably the first time anyone outside her House had ever laid a hand on her, either. "They're calling you Koschei, because we don't know your name," she continued, getting stronger now. Borusa noticed her grip on the boy's hand tightened, rather than loosening. "Can you tell me your name?"

The boy shook his head, looked confused, looked terrified. "I... Koschei. I... I like Koschei."

Flavia nodded, managed not to let anything she might be thinking about that show in her face. "Do you know where you are, Koschei?"

"Gallifrey," he said, softly. His voice turned the word to beauty incarnate, a song or a poem in the way he pronounced the common syllables. He smiled up at Flavia, a lovely, unrestrained smile. She smiled back, Borusa saw quite clearly, and then he reached up with a pale, trembling hand, and shifted one of her long curls back behind her ear. "Lady Golden Hair," he murmured. Then his hand dropped, bonelessly, back to the bed.

He was unconscious again. Borusa started toward the room, just as Flavia came out. She leaned against the door, just doing breathing exercises.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"I..." she stopped, thought about it, smiled. "His barriers are as strong as yours, Lord Borusa. He didn't even try to touch my mind. I've never seen anything like it in one so young. His disciplines are completed in that regard. I was more concerned that he appears to have forgotten his own name, and yet he knew the meaning of mine."

"That is a mystery. We will have a memory scan performed, but will have to wait until he wakes completely before a full assessment can be done." He smiled at his prized pupil. "You did very well, my dear. Ten of ten."

Flavia smiled softly, a tiny pink blush staining her cheeks. "Thank you sir. But he is no trouble."

* * *

When the boy at last woke fully, the neurological testing began in earnest. It was discovered almost immediately that he didn't remember anything personal. A scan revealed that his memory engrams had been wiped almost completely clear. Experience and testing narrowed that assessment. He knew as much as any Prydonian student his approximate age and, occasionally, he had moments of sheer, unadulterated brilliance.

He was gifted, exquisitely so, and because he was young and orphaned, the Colleges all wanted him. However, Prydon Academy had first call on him, simply because Borusa and Goth, between them, had more clout than any of the other Colleges could muster in this instance.

Borusa felt, even years later, looking back on it, that he should have seen it coming. Sometimes, he even wondered how the world could have been changed if he acted to prevent it. However, when Goth arrived with Chancellory approval to adopt the boy into his own House, as an own child besides, Borusa fought down his instinctive response to worry, and elected to go with the more social-minded response: that an orphaned child, who had been so badly injured, deserved a good family.

Borusa himself placed the boy with Class Ninety-Two, feeling that the students there, in the most gifted class he had ever managed to organize, would become a comfortable home for the promising young Koschei. That left him only two more seats to fill in that group, and only time would tell him who else to place in the group that was quickly becoming his masterpiece.

Zedric, witty, open, irresponsible Zedric, immediately set out to win the friendship of the young stranger, and he succeeded to a great extent. Koschei's personal charisma was friendly and attractive, and he soon had several of the others admiring him quite a bit for his talented way with people. In quiet moments, he would seek Zedric out and the two boys soon reduced the calm to chaos.

Despite the general mischief and random hyperactivity of the boy, which Borusa was sure he would grow out of, he was pleased and proud of Koschei's progress. He drew out young Hedin, encouraging the quiet boy's interests in law and history. He took an almost paternal pride in Damon's accomplishments in learning the ways of the Panatropic Net. He even, occasionally, curbed Zedric's more insane behaviors, and they forged a strong friendship between them that Borusa thought could only benefit both boys.

He remained friends with Flavia, which rather impressed Borusa. The woman was a hundred and fifty years his senior, but Koschei managed to find enough common ground between them that she still considered him a friend even after she graduated the Academy and began her career. Having not-so-inadvertantly overheard one of their private conversations, he learned that Koschei still referred to her as "Lady Golden Hair" as often as "Flavia".

Class Ninety-Two were raised to postulants, and Borusa continued to be delighted with their work. The children, even hyperactive Zedric and brilliant Koschei, had settled down a bit, restricting their pranks to special occasions. His life was calm and peaceful, as befitted a Time Lord of his training and stage of life.

And then, an old friend who resided in the Mountain of Solitude brought him a foundling child, and Borusa's life was never peaceful again.


	3. After the Apocalypse

A/N: The sequel to "A Long History". This story has many parts, every one related to every other one, even if they may seem disjointed at first glance. Bring your thinking caps and don't forget to let me know if you have questions. For those just tuning in: I do not support the "Lungbarrow" hypothesis. Don't forget to check my profile page for new and exciting information. Special thanks, once again, to the fantastic **Olfactory_Ventriloquism** for the help, the listening, and the beta-reading.

* * *

**Chapter 3: After the Apocalypse**

Rose Tyler stood and stared at the blank white wall. Through pain that was passing time and memories that turned into months, she stood and she stared and the wall remained white and blank.

She was never unaccompanied on her silent vigil, and yet she remained always alone. Her various watchers worried for different reasons as she made her way, each day without fail, to the wall, and watched it do nothing.

She never watched it for long and, as each day went by, she waited for less and less time. The first day, the day she was trapped here, she'd had to be sedated and carried away, at least from the room. Each day after that, for a week, she stopped for five and a half hours. After that, she took less time, until she was only spending an hour by the wall, and then a half hour.

Then came the call across the Universe Divide, and she spoke to her family, and made a heart-breaking drive to a beach in Norway, following a voice only she could hear. The wall went unwatched in the week and a half that trip took, but nothing changed it. It remained, resolutely, white and blank, like the whole room around it.

The day she returned from Norway, Rose Tyler got out of her bed at the crack of dawn and ran for a mile in the rain. Then she went back to the Tyler mansion, took a shower, and went to work at Torchwood. As usual, the lift took her to the very top of the building, to the white room with blank walls where she first came into this world.

Jake Symmonds was with her, her watcher for the day, as every one else was still recovering from the trip. He watched in resignation as five minutes passed, then six. And then, seemingly from no where, Rose snatched up a black magic marker and stood on a chair and began to write.

* * *

"Mickey!" Rose came charging down the stairs, two at a time. "I need a complete history, and I do mean complete. Everything we've got, documented history of course, and then, I also need the bits that aren't documented, the stuff that only Torchwood knows. Well, I say Torchwood, but of course I mean Torchwood and any other organization that's dealt with aliens on this planet, because it can't have been all Torchwood or this planet would have been blown out of the sky by now, god knows how good they are at pissing people off..."

"Woah!" exclaimed Mickey, looking up from the landing, staring at Rose in shock. "Hold up, there, Doctor!" he continued, knowing that if Jackie Tyler had heard him use that statement, she would have killed him dead on the spot. Jackie's orders had been explicit: no one was to mention doctors of any kind to Rose if it could at all be avoided, and certainly not that particular one.

Rose grinned down at him, three steps above him. She had sounded just like her lunatic Time Lord accomplice, and now she looked like him, too, a broad, manic grin and a dark leather coat. "C'mon, Mickey, don't say that. Jackie'll kill you for it, an' after you managed to escape her for three whole years and everything."

"Rose, you sound just like him."

"I know," she grinned. "He's contagious, what can I say? Still need that history, yeah?"

"What is going on in your head? Are you... are you trying to get back to him or..."

The grin dropped and she turned into rain, her skin going pale, her eyes filling with tears and shadows. "It isn't possible," she said, bluntly, grimly. "He told me that, an' I believe him. I can't see him again, never ever."

"So, you're giving up?" he wondered. Rose Tyler, giving up. It didn't seem right at all. When she was younger, yeah, maybe. But not now, not anymore. Now, she was so strong that mountains probably wished they had enough faith to move_ her_.

"Not giving up, Mickey. Getting on with it. S'posed to have a fantastic life, remember? Oh, wait, you weren't there. Well, but that's what he did say. 'Have a fantastic life.'" Her eyes rose to the sky and Mickey knew that she wasn't seeing the drain pipes and painted stairwell but the coral and roundels and the odd, water-color world of the inside of the TARDIS. "'Do it for me,'" she continued, and she was obviously quoting.

She shook her head and smiled at him, a soft sad smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I'd do anything for him, Mickey, you've all got to know that by now. Even have a fantastic life. Without him."

Mickey watched in wonder and horror as she practically devoured every book brought to her. She read for five days straight, pausing only occasionally to fall asleep over her books, eating as she read, walking around with the printed word in front of her face. At first it was slow going, Mickey noted, the intensity and fascination of her expression conveying a certain amount of discomfort and the subtle pain of someone not used to studying. By the end of her marathon reading sprint, however, she was reading whole pages in minutes.

She set her books aside at last, and Mickey saw her look up and grin. Then, she ran again, for hours. And then, Rose Tyler slept for an entire day.

The day after that, though, was when things started to get truly strange. First thing that morning, as she used to do, she went up to the room at the top of the tower and shut herself inside it. Mickey hoped that maybe she would come out after a couple of hours, but his hopes were well dashed by lunchtime.

Desperation demanded that he let himself inside by mid-afternoon. He was almost terrified by the prospect of what he might find. However, instead of blood or broken windows, he found only Rose, alive and healthy, standing on a step stool with a marker in her hand.

Days went by like this as well, and before long, the entire north wall was covered in Rose's small, vaguely legible handwriting. There were bits of poems, small drawings, tiny star charts, reams of notes. What made Mickey shake in his shoes, however, was the math.

It was everywhere, extensive calculations, tiny, intricate details. He knew math, some math, anyway, but not like this. Rose had veritable novels of numbers scrawled on the wall, every bit as inexplicable as the grin on her face as she surveyed her work.

"What is it?" he wondered. "Why're you so happy?"

"Not happy, just pleased," she corrected, a very tiny distinction that she insisted on making none the less. "I've isolated the causal nexus."

"The causal whatsits?"

"Look, it's like this." She sat down on a disused desk and patted it, inviting him to sit beside her. "Parallel universes aren't always necessary. Time's complicated, it's not like most people think."

"Well, yeah, we travelled in it, so it isn't just cause and effect."

"Right," Rose said. "It's really like... OK. Every universe is a tapestry. And that tapestry is s'posed to make a picture."

Mickey frowned but nodded, gesturing her to continue.

"Most things you can change in time, the Universe can pretty much work around, fix it so the picture comes out the same way it was always s'posed to do. Like, I dunno, the Universe we came from was trying to make a picture of... well, we'll say the TARDIS. Because this'll make more sense that way, ok?"

"All right," Mickey agreed hesitantly. She was talking fast and making very little sense, but he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, because there was nothing else he could do.

"Good. Now, the thing is, most of the time, the Universe can still make a picture of the TARDIS, even if you managed to, I dunno, blow up a different building or something. But sometimes, things happen that the Universe can't make the same picture around. They change things completely. I'm not explaining this well."

"No, it's alright, I get it. You're saying that the butterfly flapping it's wings in the rainforest doesn't always start a storm in California."

"Yes. Exactly!" Her grin widened and she kissed him on the forehead happily. "That's it. Well, sorta. I'm saying that even if it does, it might not matter. But some times, something does happen. It can be the tiniest, littlest thing, but it changes the whole picture, from a picture of the TARDIS, we'll say, to a picture of a London phone box instead."

"Well, I suppose that makes sense."

"Trust me, it does. It's those points, those picture altering points, that generate parallel Universes. Each one of those points is a nexus. In this case, the picture altering moment happened in a pretty big way, so I could run it down without a time machine. Just needed a history book."

"What was it?" Mickey wondered.

"Queen Victoria's death. She died in this world, where in the other one, the Doctor and I saved her from a werewolf - mostly. In this one we didn't. We weren't there, I guess, or we must've been, but maybe we weren't fast enough, I don't know. The Doctor can only exist in one Universe, in the main one, but that isn't the exact event that split it. It's the fact that she died and she died younger."

"Wait. Go back. What do you mean the Doctor can only exist in one Universe?" Mickey tapped lightly at the desktop, just a nervous habit. "I mean, we know for a fact that me, Pete, and Jackie all existed in multiple Universes."

"That's right," said Rose. "But time doesn't work the same way for the Doctor as it does for you or Mum or Pete. The Doctor's time-stream is absolute."

Mickey frowned at her. "Rose, that didn't make any sense. I mean, he's more powerful than we are, so shouldn't he exist any when or where he wants to do?"

Rose sighed and jumped up from the desk, pacing. "All right, I'll put it to you this way. Say the Doctor visited Earth during the Cyberman event. Where would he have been?"

Mickey snorted. "Exactly where he ended up - right in the middle of things."

"OK, good. So if there was a parallel Doctor, where would he have been?"

"Oh," said Mickey, thinking about it.

Rose grinned. "Just take my word for it, Mick. Time Lords are absolute - well, I guess you could say it's because they're more powerful. And since there aren't any more of them, all other Universes exist without them. Just the one we came from."

"OK, so what's all this writing on the wall, then?" Mickey wondered.

"Well, the math is where I worked out the divergence. It's been about 130 years since the change, and I needed to see how much is likely to be the same as I remember and how much is different. That's why we don't live in the UK, here, Mickey. We live in the PRGB. Because Victoria died and, in her Will, detainted her son. She may have done that in the regular Universe as well, because she blamed Bertie for his father's death, but she lived long enough to take it back there. In this one she didn't. Her dying in 1879 generated a parallel Universe."

"I thought any big event going a different way would do that."

"No," Rose said, shaking her head. "No, big events aren't usually the cause. Believe it or not, the Universe can work around big events. It's the little ones it can't work around. Usually. Like... if I'd left early from Hendrick's that night. That would have been a tiny, tiny event, no one would have even pinned it down, but it would have changed everything, because I was supposed to die there, and if I neither died nor met the Doctor, there'd have been one extra person there who shouldn't have been. And trust me, I learned the hard way that time's got ways of getting you back for that sort of thing."

"Are you saying you being alive and not missing would have changed everything?"

"Tell me this, Mickey. Would you have been brave enough to launch missiles at Downing Street a year later if you hadn't been dragged in for questioning by police half the time for a year? Or taken on a Slitheen with a baseball bat? Would you have even owned a baseball bat?"

He remembered that alley, the one where his whole world had changed. Clinging to Rose's ankles, staring at the Doctor in horror, unable to comprehend how the man - alien - could even exist. Sobbing like an infant and begging Rose not to leave him, not even realizing at the time that she'd already left him, that her heart had gone into that blue box the first time and never came out again. It never would, not even now, when she'd never see the box again. "I guess not," he admitted, unable to say all the things he really thought about all of this. There was so much there, so much changing and unchanging, so much different and so much that he could never take back.

"But I'm obviously not important if the Doctor let me come here."

Rose shook her head. "The Doctor let you stay here because this Universe can run any way it wants to do. Our Universe... Schrodinger's Cat, yeah? Never mind, I'm hungry and I'm gonna give you a headache."

"Yeah you are," Mickey agreed. He realized he was staring at her only when she shook her head apologetically. "What the hell happened to you, Rose?"

"Well, for one thing, I found out it's not a crime to be clever. You remember how it was in school. Well, Pete Tyler, in this Universe, is a certified genius, and he's genetically identical to my biological father. Mum's mad, but she's not completely stupid, either. Is it such a stretch that I was smart and no one noticed?"

Mickey thought about it, trying to remember the innocent girl he had known. She'd always been surrounded by people, because that was what interested her the most, but she was the clever one who could pick up the tiny things and figure out what really made them tick. She could get more information about a person in five minutes than he could in five weeks, and she always seemed to know who to trust and when to trust them. The only time she had really fucked up had been with Jimmy Stone and to this day, Mickey wasn't sure she'd been completely in her right mind at the time she fell for him. She'd just gotten some really bad news, after all, as he remembered, something she'd only ever confided to Shireen.

What if she had always been clever? It made a lot of the things about her that he'd noticed growing up with her make sense. And the Doctor had seen it when no one else had even bothered to look.

"Rose, Mickey, are you up there?" Jake's voice came over the head-sets they both wore in their ears. Completely different from the ear pods, these things, and a good thing, too, or no one would trust them, ever.

Mickey tapped his. "What's up?"

"We're detecting some kind of funny energy build-up over at Hope Memorial Hospital. The Exec says we should investigate and take Rose with us just in case."

Rose shrugged and tapped her earpiece. "Just in case what? Just in case he wants to sleep on the sofa?"

Pete's voice came over the system now. "Very funny, Agent Rose. You want to work for Torchwood? Come back to work for Torchwood."

She sighed. "Fine, but I'm still not carrying a gun."

"You need..." said Pete, Mickey, and Jake all at once.

"No, I don't. Some times, if people see guns and can't understand you, they shoot first and then wonder about the communication problem. Let's go."


	4. Smith and Tyler

_A/N: The sequel to "__A Long History__". This story has many parts, every one related to every other one, even if they may seem disjointed at first glance. Bring your thinking caps and don't forget to let me know if you have questions. For those just tuning in: I do not support the "Lungbarrow" hypothesis. Don't forget to check my profile page for new and exciting information. Special thanks, once again, to the fantastic **Olfactory_Ventriloquism** for the help, the listening, and the beta-reading._

* * *

**Chapter 4: Smith and Tyler**

They invaded Hope Memorial as a team from Torchwood, looking everywhere, scanning everything, not even bothering to try for stealth with the energy build-up increasing so rapidly. They hadn't had even one iota of luck when someone started yelling about the rain falling up.

And then, they were on the moon. Panic ensued, as panic will, and the team from Torchwood found themselves as the highest authorities on the premises.

Then, the ugly great space rhinos turned up and suddenly, Rose Tyler seemed to rise from the dead. Her eyes lit up and she grinned and charged through the crowd to meet the rhinos, standing there just as happily as you please in the face of such utter strangeness. "Judoon!" she exclaimed. "Brilliant, you used the water, didn't you?"

The Judoon flashed a light in her face and Mickey jumped forward, but Rose held out a hand. The thing made a lot of long 'o' noises and then said, "Earth language, English, assimilated."

"Can I have one of those?" Rose asked. "Please? It will be very useful."

Even Mickey could tell that the space rhino had never seen her like before in its entire life. "Who are you?" the Judoon demanded.

"I'm Agent Rose. I work for Torchwood and, in this case, that gives me the authority to speak for the humans here. You know you can't really go around collecting hospitals from Level Five planets. It's rude. Hospitals are a place of rest for people to get well."

"We are seeking a fugitive from justice."

"Yes," said Rose, calmly. "I know what you do, and I understand your mission. You'll have to work with me, though, so these people don't get hurt."

"You have no jurisdiction here."

Rose shook her head. "Neither have you. Shadow Proclamation, I know. But I have jurisdiction over the people who are here and the property that is here. You only have jurisdiction over the suspect who is here. We'll help you find that person if we can conclude this quickly. Before the oxygen runs out, please."

In this situation, suddenly, Rose was back in a way Mickey had hardly seen her. He'd suspected something like this when she'd turned up on her own at Canary Wharf, looked a Dalek in the eye, and told it she'd killed its Emperor. She was on her top form, here, giving orders, calming people, asking questions. She bullied the doctors, she bullied he and Jake, she bullied the hospital administration. She even bullied the Judoon.

"Yes, I'm human. It's time-travel radiation. You really need to up the level of your scans, if it's confusing you. He's got it too, if you need a comparison." She gestured at Mickey and he got a light in the face for her pains. The aliens compared the scans and, though they continued to seem quite suspicious, Rose distracted them again.

"Why can't you just do a high level scan for the type of alien you're trying to find?" Then, she grinned again, that fake but insane Doctor grin she seemed so proud of, and snapped her fingers. "I've got it. What you're looking for can disguise itself. Like a chameleon or something. You are definitely going to have to use a higher scan level, then, because I'm not letting you off every 'might not be human' in the building. There could be some perfectly harmless aliens here, too, you know, evolutionary resonance in this Galaxy making just about everyone look about the same on the outside."

They trooped up through the hospital, the leader of the Judoon talking only to Rose and its troops, and Mickey could tell it was completely fascinated with her. "Look, next time you have a fugitive on Earth, how about calling me first, all right? These people are scared to death. That poor girl in there thinks she can't possibly be breathing, and I swear if you don't put that gun away, you're gonna hurt someone and I'm gonna get difficult."

She decided to look for suspicious medical histories and nearly exploded at the Judoon who followed her while its troops searched the floor they currently occupied. "You wiped the records! You're looking for a non-human in a human hospital, that was thick! Mickey, see what you can do with it."

They finally found the suspect by tracking, not the non-human traces or the two bodies they had found, but the sudden build-up of energy in MRI. He and Jake deactivated the medical machine turned weapon while Rose threatened the Judoon with complaining about them to someone if they didn't return the hospital and its contents to the Earth immediately. The air was getting thin, very thin, and they were getting desperate.

They all blacked out, as far as Mickey knew, but they all woke up to find a hospital full of people, scared half to death but blessedly alive.

* * *

Mickey knew where he would find Rose, but he hesitated to intrude. In fact, only a direct order from Pete, given in person, finally sent him to "Rose's Room" at the top of the tower. Mickey let himself in silently, reluctant to disturb his friend in her only sanctuary.

Rose stood against that terrible wall, her back to the door, her body slumped as if in defeat. Mickey watched her for several long, heavy-hearted moments before he realized she was speaking.

"Everybody lived," Rose murmured. "Nearly everybody, anyway, and that's all right, I suppose. They nabbed the bad guy an' Mickey an' Jake saved the world. You're right, though. Really can't say anything bad about having a day like this, when it's so rare."

Mickey didn't dare move or even breathe. Rose had found catharsis in that wall, the one that she'd once wanted to tear down with her bare hands. He turned just as quietly as he had entered and left her with her conversation with a man who could neither reply nor even hear her.

* * *

"That's it, I guess," said Rose over coffee the next day. "This Earth knows it has alien problems as well as human ones. Everything changes."

"Nope," said Mickey. "They're writing it off as hallucinations."

"You are so kidding me," she replied, thunderstruck.

"Nope. And do you know why?"

"Never mind why, how can they possibly?"

"Because the hospital didn't lose power."

She gaped at him and then, to Mickey's everlasting, if secret, amusement, she shook her head and muttered, "Stupid apes."

* * *

So it went on like this for months. Rose spent long hours in the top of the tower, trying to solve, apparently, the mysteries of the Universe. She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes; she laughed, but it sounded hollow. It was only when there were alien encounters to work through or alien tech to play with that she seemed truly alive. Mickey would bet, though, that he was the only one who knew that, after every alien encounter, whether it went right or wrong, she went to the top of the tower and leaned on the wall until the terror inside her was put to bed.

Everyone else thought she was fearless. Mickey began to believe that she was trying too hard to convince herself she was. He also suspected that she wasn't afraid of dying. She wasn't truly suicidal, but she counted herself no loss.

He wanted to talk to her about it, but he hadn't found the nerve. Then, ten months after her arrival in "Pete's World", they encountered something more vicious and deadly than all the Slitheen, Sycorax, and Weevils they had ever encountered, put together: Jackie Tyler in labor.

"I expect there are men on planets we've never heard of who are sorry for your Dad right now," said Mickey.

"Her Dad?" asked Owen Harper, the Torchwood doctor who would be tending to Jackie. For some reason, Rose's mum absolutely adored the sarcastic little prick.

"He said, 'the new dad,'" Rose corrected. "He mumbles a lot. And aren't you supposed to be delivering a baby?"

"Do you ever get time off, Agent Rose?" asked Dr. Harper.

"No, I don't," she said. "Now go deliver that baby before those planets feel sorrier for you than the Executive."

Harper finally went in and Rose leaned against the wall. "I feel like I'm living in some kind of secret agent film. 'The Executive' indeed." She snickered.

"Sorry," Mickey apologized.

"Don't worry about it. But Mickey, he really isn't my dad. He's a great man and I like him, but he's my step-dad and he's going to have to stay that way. I saw my dad die too many times to mix it up, even if I did want to know what he and my father had in common. I think... you know, that first time we came here? I think it was more the shock of finding out they had everything they ever wanted because I was never born. I used to think it was my fault he died, sometimes. And then to find out that it was? God."

"It was not your fault," Mickey told her coldly.

Rose shook her head. "Maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the first time. I dunno."

"What do you mean, 'the first time'?" he asked.

"Never mind," she answered, and pulled out her mobile to answer her email.

* * *

When the baby was finally born, and the small, strange, blended family finally had some privacy, Rose and Mickey got to meet Rose's baby brother at last.

"Can you believe it?" Jackie asked tiredly. "We really did have a boy. I was so sure..."

"All the ultrasounds said he was a boy, Mum," Rose reminded her.

"I know that, but Jackie and Pete and a baby, shouldn't it have been you, again?"

Rose shook her head. "Time's not a straight line, Mum. It's... never mind, just different circumstances give a different result. Have you decided on a name for him?"

Jackie looked at Pete, who shrugged at her. Jackie sighed and nodded, looking exhausted but resigned. Mickey wondered why she seemed so distressed, but then she spoke and he knew. "Well, Rose... what's the Doctor's name? We really think we should call him after the man who brought us together." Jackie hadn't mentioned the Doctor to Rose once in all the entire time they had been here, and even on the drive to Norway had referred to him as "that alien." She'd seemed determined all this time to put him as out of mind as he was out of sight.

Rose shook her head and her whole face went very strange and very, very shuttered. "It's... not human," she said. "It won't work."

"Well, we can't call him Doctor," Jackie complained, annoyed.

"So call him Jason," Rose said. "Means healer. Or call him John, the Doctor sometimes goes by that."

"Call him God," Mickey suggested darkly. "That's who the Doctor thinks he is."

Rose snickered, then started to laugh. Mickey hadn't heard the sound in so long that it took him a moment to realize that it was her real laugh, genuine and like bells. He grinned too, a little proud of himself.

Jackie was not to be thwarted. "We still have to come up with a name for the baby," she reminded Rose, over her sudden levity. She was obviously exhausted, or she might have encouraged her daughter's happiness. Then again, maybe she hadn't realized, as concentrated as she had been on her pregnancy, that this was such a rare miracle these days. Jackie was intent, instead, to make Rose name the baby, her way, Mickey thought, to convince Rose that the baby and the new Tyler family were still her family.

"I know," Rose said, smiling an honest smile for the first time in ages. "Don't call him after the Doctor. Call him after someone else. Like Granddad Prentice or Mickey or someone."

"Anthony?" Pete questioned Jackie, taking the Granddad Prentice suggestion to heart.

"That's perfect," Jackie decided. "Anthony John Tyler. We'll call him Tony." She drifted slowly off to sleep at last, content that she had succeeded in her mission to bind Rose to Tony in this small way.

Pete, who was holding the baby, looked softly at Rose. Mickey knew he loved Rose, had actually loved the idea of her before she even left this world for the first time, even though Rose scared him to death. That was actually how Pete and the Preachers had joined forces in the first place: Pete had hunted them down to question Mickey about Rose. What he'd told the man who could have been her father had made Pete only want Rose for a daughter even more, and in the end it was that that Mickey had used to persuade Pete to jump the Universe Divide one last time, to snatch her from the jaws of death.

"Just make sure she's safe," Mickey had said, "and if she is, come right back and at least we'll know."

"Do you want to hold your brother?" Pete offered, his way of making sure that Rose knew that she was part of his new family as well.

Rose smiled happily, her eyes lighting up and sparkling with true, complete joy. She walked over to look at the baby, laughing softly. "Anthony John Tyler," she murmured. "So pleased to finally meet you." She took one more step.

Somewhere between shifting her weight and moving forward, Rose Tyler disappeared.


	5. Repercussions

Chapter 5:

When his daughter broke and ran away from the Untempered Schism, Borusa accepted some good-natured ribbing from Prydon Academy's new Master of Postulants. The also new Master of Novices was not amused. "You need to go after her," he said urgently.

Borusa looked down at the younger Time Lord and saw the memory of terrible fear in the blue eyes pleading with him earnestly. "Verity," the Master of Novices said. "She'll be upset. You need to go after her."

"Thank you, Doctor, I know," said Borusa. "But I know right where to find her and she'll be safe enough." Nevertheless, he started after the little girl he had raised as his own, knowing full well she was headed for the TARDIS gardens.

That was where he'd found her father, after all.

Verity was, thankfully, the very picture of her mother. She had the Doctor's jet hair, but her enormous dark eyes and her fair, delicate features all came from the human girl who had carried her so very briefly. Borusa was delighted with her every day for so many reasons, but he never quite forgot his guilt for the fact that the child, who charmed her way into his hearts with her very first smile, was stolen.

Verity, at least, he could comfort when he found her. She threw herself into his arms, sobbing bitterly. Borusa calmed her as best he could, wondering if this was what other Time Lord parents were having to endure elsewhere. For all that he had educated generations of Time Lords, Borusa had never had one of his own.

For the first time in his life, he rather doubted the wisdom of one of their most ancient and revered practices.

After the children had been separated by the Academies and settled in, the Director of Prydon Academy met his new staff for a late meal. The Master of Postulants was his usual charming self, comfortable and confident. "Is our little one comfortable, then?" he asked pleasantly.

"Our?" Borusa questioned archly. "Koschei, I'm not adopting you. I expect your father would argue."

"I think he was proposing, actually," the Doctor said dryly, a bland half-smile gracing his features with a brief hint of their old puckishness.

"Doctor, you wound me," Koschei bantered back immediately. "You know I've only eyes for you."

"Your admirers will be devastated to hear it," was the Doctor's quick, witty comeback. Neither, Borusa noted, would ever acknowledge the truth – such as it was – in Koschei's words.

Borusa sighed. "Boys, while this routine was amusing when you were children, you are supposed to be professionals now. Koschei, you're of an age to marry. I suggest you do so. Doctor… I despair of you."

"We were genuinely concerned about Verity, you know," the Doctor said quietly. "We were your senior students when you brought her in. Even Ushas likes her and, I dare say, that's truly saying something."

"Ushas doesn't like anyone," Koschei clarified. "She less actively dislikes Verity."

Borusa shook his head. "You both could do better than to disparage the Lord President's favorite acolyte, you know."

The younger men traded small, devious glances but said nothing. They seemed to have learned a little restraint since their graduation. Borusa conceded to their concern. "Verity was fine when I left her. She seems genuinely interested in her upcoming classes and has already taken a fondness to her rather homesick room mate."

"I'll look in on her before I retire," the Doctor promised.

Borusa, who would have expected to be alarmed or at least annoyed by such a suggestion, instead accepted it gratefully. A nod was all the acknowledgement he gave to his daughter's natural father, but he hoped the younger man understood.

They moved on then, to other, simpler topics. The ceremony, they discussed at length, and how the two young men felt their new charges had performed, what could be expected of them in the future. Of course, any conversation with the Doctor and Koschei wandered, and this one was no exception.

"How is your brother, then?" Borusa asked, as Koschei had mentioned Zedric in passing.

The Doctor didn't seem to have been paying attention, but Borusa was used to this new behavior. Ever since the near disaster on Earth, the Doctor's mind had a tendency to wander at the most inappropriate times. Koschei touched his arm lightly, and the Doctor started back to the here and now with only a "hum?" of acknowledgement.

"I inquired after Zedric, Doctor," Borusa said to remind the younger Time Lord. "Has he become so thought-provoking since last I saw him?"

The Doctor smiled one of his rare half-smiles in apology. "Sometimes I forget," he offered.

"That Zedric can be thought-provoking or that you're a member of his House, now?" Koschei wondered. There was a light tease to his tone, which made the Doctor's smile almost venture towards the genuine article.

"So many things have happened since then," the Doctor said, and then he shook his head as if to ward off… something.

Borusa watched all of this with heavy hearts. Even the Doctor didn't know how true that statement really was.

*

Tradition sent the children home after their trip to Earth. They were supposed to discuss what they had learned with their families, share their new insights, and benefit from their elders' wisdom. Even the students of Class 92, who remembered nothing, due to an illness that had swept the group, had things to share.

Thete, however, had no one to share them with. Koschei and Zedric were reluctant to leave the younger boy alone with the strange dreams that had haunted him since his recovery, and brought their concerns to Borusa for help. Borusa had no suggestions for them, just that they should give him time. The severed bond would have symptoms, Borusa knew, but without the memory, there shouldn't be any particular damage to the boy's future. He had to believe that.

Zedric asked Thete to come home with him. Borusa was astonished when the boy agreed, but even that shock couldn't prepare him for what happened next.

Zedric's father came down on Borusa's head like lightning from a clear sky, just appeared in his office, raging. "There is an orphaned Time Lord visiting my House. His parents weren't important enough for you to notice or acknowledge? Why was the Full Council never informed of this?"

Borusa didn't even have to fake utter bewilderment. Thete had never confessed his status to anyone. It had been their secret, in a way, just something that was never discussed. "I wasn't made aware of this," Borusa lied once he recovered his aplomb. "Thete never discusses his life outside of the Academy."

The Head of House Arpel could have launched an investigation, made a great public spectacle of all of this, and possibly excavated the whole truth. He didn't. He merely turned up again two days later, short a large collection of favors, and in possession of permission to adopt the young Time Lord, designated "Theta Sigma" into the House of Rassilon as a right line child.

"You've been very kind to protect the boy's privacy like this."

The other man smiled. "He's a good boy. Gentle, quiet, diffident, and a good influence on my terrible child."

Borusa felt like he'd been hit by a meteor, and it only got worse. "He's picked up the most delightful nick name as well. I think it will be interesting to have the Doctor in my House."

The name stuck, so well in fact that people rarely remembered the Doctor had ever been addressed as anything else. Borusa often found himself wondering how the name, of all things, had resurfaced but, aside from a lingering quietude, the Doctor showed no other memories of the trip to Earth.

When the Doctor managed to scrape a pass at fifty-three percent on his second try for his final exams, everyone who knew the Doctor's mental acuity excused it as nerves and a slow recovery from the illness that had effected the whole class. Borusa didn't bother to correct them.

What he had done, to the Doctor, to the Earth woman, to their daughter – he always convinced himself it had been the right thing, but sometimes it was a very difficult job indeed.

*

The Doctor called Borusa to his office at a ridiculous hour. Forgetting, in his sleep addled state, what the Doctor had promised him before they parted ways earlier that night, the Director of Prydon Academy could only assume that something of the regular operations of the groups of Novices had gone wrong.

Borusa was therefore quite astounded when he trudged in to find the younger man staring at him in bewilderment, an eight-year old Verity clinging to him as if to never let him go. No one but an adult of their own family was supposed to touch a Time Lord child, and the children were supposed to know better as well. In her fear, Verity's genetics had over-ridden her rearing, and she had thrown herself at her biological father the moment she set eyes on him.

The blue eyes that looked back at Borusa were so empty and aching that it was all he could do to detach the child and hold onto her. All the while, Verity curled, weeping, in his arms and - most hearts-breakingly - screamed silently for her mother.

The images she projected made it clear: the woman she wanted was someone who could never reach her.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor tried to apologize. His shoulders were shaking and his eyes were wet. Rassilon alone knew what Verity's untrained telepathy, fragile though it was, had shown him.

"Think nothing of it, Doctor," Borusa managed at last, getting a shield up around Verity as quickly and effectively as he could.

"I saw her," Verity explained, even as Borusa tried to silence her, "I want her. Where is she?"

"Hush now," the Doctor told her, his voice gentle, sincere, and so very hurt. "She's a dream, Verity. Just a dream. Your father's here, you're safe. I won't let anything happen to you."

The juxtaposition of the two phrases very nearly jerked the truth from Borusa's lips. He wanted nothing more at that point in time, absolutely nothing, than to hand Verity into her real father's arms and let someone who knew a thing or two about love comfort her properly. He'd come to love the beautiful little girl with every bit of the emotion he could manage, but sometimes, especially right now, he truly doubted that he would ever be able to give her what she should have had.

The Doctor conjured a rather strange chair from somewhere and let Borusa settle into it with the sniffling little girl. After a moment or so of watching them with haunted eyes, the younger Time Lord disappeared somewhere, leaving Borusa to the last thing he expected when he swore this child would want for nothing.

She had never cried like this, never projected like this. For the longest time, Borusa had honestly expected that Verity would be almost completely mind-blind. It wouldn't have been an issue – only a few Time Lords had the strongest telepathy, anyway. It seemed, instead, that she had managed to be a late bloomer, or that contact with the Schism had awakened previously dormant gifts.

The new fledged contact was almost painful, and yet joyful. She had no idea what to do with what she had learned, so Borusa spent several long moments silently guiding her where she was allowed and gently shutting her out of places it wasn't safe for her to be. He kept his instructions calm and simple, years of educating children from a distance making it easier to understand her than he ever would have imagined.

Verity finally calmed and drifted off to sleep. Some time later the Doctor came in to check on them and Borusa smiled a grateful smile at the younger man. "Nice chair," he commented quietly.

"A 'rocking chair' – thought it might come in handy with some of the little ones. I didn't think it would be Verity who needed it first, though." He smiled an almost-smile, but Borusa could tell that the younger man had been severely jarred by the experience.

"Are you all right, Doctor?"

"I just… I should apologize. They informed me she had a nightmare and wouldn't be calmed." He shook his head, self-disgust evident in the set of his body and the sudden furious pacing. "I should have had them take her straight to you."

Borusa shook his head. "You did what you thought best, Doctor. The responsibility for these children is new to you, and you can hardly call their parents out of bed for every nightmare any of them have."

"Oh, can't I?" The Doctor's jaw tightened and his blue eyes flashed momentary steel before softening as they fell on the sleeping Verity. "Doesn't matter," he said softly.

Where had the dauntless young crusader gone? Borusa wondered momentarily. When had the wild and defiant Doctor been replaced by this calmer, colder shadow? He shouldn't really wonder, in truth, because he knew, while no one else did.

With some assistance on the Doctor's part, Borusa managed to get out of the awkward chair with his sleeping burden, determined to put distance between the lot of them before emotion over-rode good sense and the promise he had made concerning the two young people and this child.

"I've meant to ask you, actually," the Doctor said. "Does she get those huge eyes from your House?"

Verity's eyes were liquid brown and, the Doctor was right, enormous. Borusa was vulnerable at the moment, his defense a little frayed at the edges. "I'm not sure," was the best lie he could muster under the circumstances.

"She's a lovely little girl." The Doctor's hand twitched toward the dark hair that splayed chaotically about the sleeping child's head. The effort to restrain himself might have been enormous from the pained expression as he looked up to meet Borusa's eyes. "You must be very proud."

"I am," Borusa admitted, because it was absolutely true. Verity was everything he could have ever hoped for, really. Sometimes, rarely, her half-human blood shone through, but every time it did, except this one, it was always to her credit.

"Her name's from Earth, isn't it?" the Doctor asked as Borusa made his way to the door, his awkward burden still clinging to him, even in sleep. "However did you come up with it?"

"I liked it."

"I do, too," the Doctor admitted. Smiling wistfully, distantly, he murmured a soft quote, "'Truth is the daughter of time.'"

Borusa's blood ran cold.


	6. Voyage Into Yesterday

**Relics of Eternity**

_Chapter 6: Voyage Into Yesterday_

"Could've just said, 'You, Rose Tyler, have time traveled,' you know," Rose told the rather obvious indication of exactly how many buckets of bad had been poured in with her this time. "Could've said, 'Bad Day Coming', or 'Sucks to Be You,' or just, 'Doom Ahoy.'" She glowered at the offending inanimate object and it did exactly what inanimate objects do when not obeying any interesting laws of physics. "Coulda said 'Welcome to Hell,' woulda covered it nicely." She thumped the item and it finally acknowledged her by falling off the wall. "But no, you have to go an' say 'Titanic'."

In disgust, and hoping she'd somehow turned up on a movie set (though there'd been no Titanic in Pete's World and it therefore didn't seem likely), Rose jerked open the nearest door and stepped out onto the deck of a luxurious, if doomed, ocean liner. She had no idea what had happened to her, how she was going to get back, how many buildings would explode when her mum found out she'd disappeared, none of it. All she knew at the moment was that no one seemed to notice her, and that was a good thing.

For a few moments, her brain swirling with possibilities as to how this had occurred (Rift activity, Pete's Universe rejecting her, sudden blow to the head followed by coma induced hallucinations), she merely wandered around, searching for some sign of what she was meant to do here. There had to be some sort of explanation for how she'd left the hospital where she was just about to meet her newborn brother, and ended up watching the waves crash in the blue wake of this enormous ship.

Night was coming, and with the night would come the deaths of most of the people who were wandering about sight-seeing and being generally convinced that they truly were on an unsinkable vessel. The ship would lie at the bottom of the ocean, final resting place, memorial, and object lesson all rolled into one. A watery grave for most of the crew and passengers, and now for one displaced time traveler.

She decided, since it didn't look like she needed to steal period clothes or find some other way to blend in, that the easiest thing would be to head to the lounge. Alcohol warmed the blood and numbed the senses and she didn't want to be aware as she froze to death nearly a century before she might or might not have been born.

She wondered what the Doctor would do and decided that, depending on where she was, the sinking of the Titanic would probably be a fixed event. Therefore, he would do whatever needed to be done and then run for his life. She didn't have that option, though and, since she knew of no possible way she could have ended up here, she also knew of no way she could undo what had happened.

However, walking up to a bar next to a solitary gentleman with his head bowed over a rather large glass of amber liquid, she was suddenly confronted with the fact that she might have been mistaken on several counts in that theory. She was in the middle of placing her order with a cheerful looking barman when her fellow lonely drinker slowly raised his head.

Time might have dulled the memory slightly, but Rose would know that sculpture perfect profile anywhere. She stared. The man turned his head with seemingly great reluctance and stared back.

The barkeep placed an unnoticed drink in front of her, then shuffled down the bar to deal with some less thunderstruck patrons than the pair who had frozen there in a perfect tableau of shock. Rose tried to drag her voice out first. "Wh...wha..."

"S'been years, Rose, years. Couldja please stop hauntin' me?" The blue eyes gazing at her were flinty and nearly destroyed. Then, he shook his head roughly, turned back to his drink, and drained it.

Hand trembling, Rose reached slowly, convinced he would vanish the instant they touched. Instead, her hand encountered only fine silk. The owner of the silk shirt flinched. "You're a right powerful hallucination, this time," he observed, in that dry, emotionless tone he could fake so well. "I'll give ya that." He reached over, took another drink (hers, though her brain wasn't registering that at the moment) and drained it as well.

Now shaking from head to foot, Rose covered her mouth with her hand. Nevertheless, the one word she whispered was still fully audible to herself and the man with her. "Doctor."

He was here. Her blue-eyed Doctor, with his war-shattered gaze and his slightly oversized ears was sitting next to her on a bar stool on the Titanic, hours before it met an iceberg and taught history that 'indestructable' was not a good word to apply to anything that didn't regenerate. Rose had to work to force air into her lungs. "My Doctor," she said shakily, but with rising conviction. She might doubt everything else in the entirety of two Universes, but not this. The leather coat might be missing, a fine Edwardian suit replacing the jumper and denim, but this Doctor was hers, even if the others were not.

"Your Doctor?" The Doctor chuckled mirthlessly. "Not only are ya persistent, you're right presumptuous, this time. As I recall, you're not mine an' if you're not mine, I don't have ta be yours, do I?" His voice had gone, during the course of his speech, from cold and cynical to a weary regret to actual pleading.

"But I am yours," she said. God, why hadn't she told him the day they met? Why did it take losing him forever twice, and whatever the hell was going on here, to finally blurt it out?

"Right," the Doctor said. He raised his head and gave her a grin so beautiful and so broken that her heart, already ruined, shattered into a million pieces. "Fantastic. Barman, whatever was in that last one, keep 'em coming just like it."

Rose wanted to ask him what had happened, to him, to her, what in the world he was thinking, and how she had gotten here, but one thing suddenly became obvious to her, telling her that any other questions she might want to ask were going to have to wait.

The Doctor was drunk.

"How'd you manage that, then?" she wondered.

"Manage what?" he said, blinking at her quite innocently.

"Don't you pull that look on me, Doctor, I know all your tricks. What're you doing on the Titanic, drunk clear out of your skull?"

"Now, Rose, don't nag, you'll end up soundin' like that mum o' yours. What'd she say 'bout the coffee table, anyway?"

Rose thought about it, tried to remember what he was on about, and the memory suddenly clicked. They'd crashed the coffee table in the process of fighting with the Auton hand. Months later, that scene used to give her the funniest tingles - the Doctor's weight above her, the adrenaline... it would always have been one of her best memories, if not for the bit of plastic trying to kill her. She grinned. "Dunno. Didn't go back to find out, did I?" Not until a year later, anyway, and by then, the coffee table was probably evidence of supposed foul play.

He snorted. "What, you an' Rickey run off ta Vegas that night or somethin'?"

Rose felt herself go pale, staggered against the Doctor because her legs were trying not to support her. "Doctor..."

His arm had come up to support her, and he was looking deeply into her eyes. "Yes, Rose?" he murmured.

"Did you mention it also travels in time?"

"S'a good line," he mumbled. "I like it."

Then, he was kissing her. That's all there was to it. One minute, he didn't even believe she existed, the next he had turned on his barstool, wrapped his arms around her, and seized her lips in a dark, deep, passionate kiss that sent all her senses reeling. He wasn't gentle or persuasive at all - he was drunk and alone and there was a desperate possessiveness to his every movement. His hands pressed her to his body, his mouth claimed hers, no finesse, just his tongue forcing its way past her lips, taking control of her mouth like he was trying to reach her very soul.

Rose moaned and, unable to help herself, kissed him back, just as desperate and lonely and confused. He was her Doctor, really hers. His doubled heart beats were thundering under the hands she pressed to his chest, his skin and lips and tongue were cool against her human fire. She had missed him for so long and loved him forever, and here she was, kissing him at last and at first, all at once.

He pulled back only enough to start trailing kisses across her face. "You taste like time, Rose," he murmured as his lips brushed her skin. "Like time an' rain an' moonlight. You feel like forever..." He pulled back, his hands clenched on her shoulders, almost hurting her in their fierceness. "Why can't you be real?" he demanded.

"I think you two might want to head to your room," the bartender suggested. "This is hardly the place."

"Time travel is complete shit sometimes," the Doctor complained, and took her hand, leading her away from the bar rather too quickly.

Rose found her voice at last. "Are... are we going back to the TARDIS?"

"Nope. Got a cabin o' me own an' everything. Had ta trade some friends for it, that was fun, but we're good."

"That why you're dressed like this, then? You've gone undercover?" She gestured at his cravat, the coat he had somehow managed to put on, the whole outfit.

"Hush," he said, shoved her against a wall, and started snogging her again. Rose knew for certain that something was terribly wrong, and if the Doctor would just give her a moment to think, she might figure it out.

It just wasn't fair. No one could think anywhere near as quickly as he could, especially not with the sudden rush of endorphins trying to flood her bloodstream, especially not with his mouth determinedly taking inventory of hers, especially not with something that hard and that insistent pressing against her body. Rose stopped trying to think and just tried to get closer instead.

"That's good," he murmured encouragement against her lips as her hips rocked against him. "Oh, Rose, that's just right."

"TARDIS?" she suggested again when he rested his head on top of hers and clutched frantically at her hips.

"Cabin," he corrected again. "Like normal people."

She giggled, and tried to bring her leg up around his hip. "Thought you didn't do domestic, Doctor," she murmured.

"Completely scandalous," said some random woman's voice.

Rose stiffened while the Doctor chuckled darkly. "S'nothin' to worry about," he said cheerfully, and took her hand again, tugging her along the deck. "We're all goin' down with the ship, she won't have too much time ta be all offended."

Rose froze as his words hit her like the icy Atlantic that awaited them. "I don't want to go down with the ship," she protested.

"Good thing you're not real, then," the Doctor replied.

"Doctor," Rose said, firmly, "you need to get sober, right now."

He glared at her. "D'you think I want to be sober when I drown? Be a lot nicer this way." His large hand cupped her bum, squeezed lightly.

Rose wasn't sure he wasn't serious. "Doctor, let's go to the TARDIS and get out of here. We're not going down on this ship."

He chuckled, a wicked, filthy sound that managed to completely soak Rose's knickers before his next words had a chance. "I'm going down on you, love. You're on this ship. I'd say that works out."

"Doctor," she gasped. She'd never seen him like this. Well, not when she was awake, anyway. He was absolutely radiating sex; even his smell (minus the leather, still with the mysteries) was compelling her to just say "fuck it" and... well, that thought didn't really need any more explanation. "Doctor, I can't. Not when you're drunk. That'd never be fair."

"Great, even my hallucinations wanna play by the rules." He grumbled this, and several other untranslated things, then reached over and unlocked the door to a well-appointed, completely luxurious cabin. "Home, sweet home."

Rose, who knew posh now in ways she could never have imagined before she was snatched into Pete's World mere moments from a fate worse than death, was still blown away by the sheer grandeur of this room. Everything about it screamed of elegance, very nearly decadence, but not quite, though Rose knew that as well. "S'beautiful," she told the Doctor quietly.

"You're beautiful," he replied, and moved to kiss her again.

Rose stopped him this time. "No, you need to sober up, Doctor. I'm not taking advantage of you. You'd never kiss me if you were sober, I know that."

"You'd never kiss me if I were sober," he replied, grimly. "I asked, Rose. I'd've got down on my knees an' begged you, did you know that? For just that impossible moment, it felt like I wasn't alone anymore, an' then you said 'no', an' I knew. If anyone woulda come with me, it'd've been you. So I must be meant ta be alone, an' I don't wanna live like that."

Rose's heart melted. "I'm here, now, Doctor," she said gently, stroking her hand across the back of his hair. "Just... get your head on straight and we'll go to the TARDIS and get out of here, you and me, together."

"You'll vanish," he insisted.

"I won't, I promise." She took his hand and laced her fingers through his. "See this?" she said, holding up their joined hands. "This is how we're s'posed to be, and we're stayin' that way, ok? Just... I know you can do it, so please do it for me."

He let his head drop to her shoulder. "All right," he said, completely resigned. "For you, Rose Tyler. Whatever gods help me, anything for you."

She moved to pull away from his embrace, fully expecting him to want his space once he'd assimilated the alcohol. In response, the Doctor pinned her to the wall again, watching her carefully through intense and stormy eyes.

"Your hearts are racing," Rose commented softly.

He smiled. "My metabolism, dealin' with the alcohol, since you asked nicely. An' when did I tell ya I had two hearts?"

Rose blinked at the rather irrelevant question. He'd told her... um... She shrugged. It seemed, now that she thought about it, that she'd always known. "Figured it out, I guess," she said. "We were awfully close when I rescued you."

He grinned, eyes twinkling mischief, but now perfectly clear. "Wish you were real," he said. "We could get even closer." His hips rocked against hers and nothing had changed, except that he didn't appear to be drunk anymore.

"Doctor, I am real."

He smirked that little knowing smirk. "Pretty sure you're more like a last request, Rose, especially knowin' things like that. But it's nice, anyway. I'm sober now, will you take me to bed? S'a nice bed."

"Maybe I'm the one hallucinating," she decided suddenly. "You're never this forward in real life. Even when you go all rude and not ginger, ya jumped right away after you asked if you were sexy."

"Fine," the Doctor agreed. "Since you're hallucinating, let me take you to bed."

"In the TARDIS," she insisted.

"Nope, there's a nice bed right over there." He gestured, completely accurately, and he had a point. Still.

"That bed's about to be water-logged an' damn cold, besides. Don't want to be interrupted, do we?"

"That's why I'm not going back to the TARDIS. She's interfered too often, kept me alive when I should be dead. But now, we'll both sink into the Atlantic, an' that'll be the end of it, an' good riddance to us both."

"No," Rose retorted fiercely. "No, it won't. You're gonna make it through this, you've got to. 'Cuz back on Earth, right where you left her, is a little blonde stupid ape who knows she just made the biggest mistake of her life. An' she needs you, s'much as you think you need her."

"Rose..."

"No. Listen to me. It isn't over. There's stuff we gotta do together, worlds we gotta see, things we need to fix."

"Rose..."

"Doctor, I'm serious here, I've never been more serious in my life. There's time lines you gotta fix, things that're s'posed to happen that'll only happen if you make 'em happen. I know you lost too much, I know it's killing you. But please, please believe me when I tell you that there's gonna come a time when it'll seem a little easier. It's never gonna stop hurting, but there'll come a time when you stop hating yourself."

He stared at her, utterly shocked, completely speechless. "Rose..." he croaked, at last, and then there were tears streaming from his eyes. "Rose, I don't _want_ to."

She held her arms open for him, let him sob bitter agony into her shoulder. His weight was quite heavy for her, but she didn't think it was as heavy as he ought to be. She wondered if he'd been starving himself and couldn't find it in her to doubt it. It had all come together and now it was playing a hideous tune. The TARDIS was on the Titanic and so was he - because then Time Lord and time ship could sink under the icy Atlantic and probably never be found again. He was wearing these clothes so no one would think anything of it if by some chance his body was found. He could just be left to his watery grave or buried, nameless, in some earthy tomb.

The Doctor was actually, actively, trying to commit suicide.

The choice of deaths wasn't lost on her, either. It was a fixed event, and he couldn't help anyone, except the family he had talked out of this cabin. He would die with people he couldn't save, in circumstances he couldn't do anything to stop.

In water, because Time Lords burned their respected dead.

She ran a hand across the back of his hair, gentling him like the broken soul he was. "Oh, my Doctor, what are you doing to yourself?" she murmured.

"I just want it to be over," he whispered. "I was never meant to survive; it shouldn't have even been _possible_. I'm so old, an' I'm so tired, an' they never wanted me anyway." His eyes when he turned them on her this time reminded her of distant street lamps in foggy London nights - blue and chilly and damp and solitary.

"I want you," Rose told him. "I've always wanted you, even when I was a little girl, wishing on stars. I wanted love and adventure and not to stay still, and I got you."

"Then why didn't you come with me?"

"I was scared... no, not of your life, not of what you do. What you meant. I could feel it, you know, when you showed me - the Earth turning under my feet. I could feel it, and I didn't know... You're gonna change my life, everything about me. I'll think - she will, I guess, that little girl in the alley - I'll think you having a time machine will be ok, because then I can go back."

"I don't understand." The Doctor sighed and scraped a hand over his face, stopping to pinch the bridge of his nose. "I'm so tired."

"Let's go find the TARDIS," she said. "We'll go find the TARDIS and I'll feed you an' we'll talk."

"I don't want to talk!" he snapped in frustration. "Don't you understand? You're not real, you're just a product of my mind tryin' to force me ta keep goin' when I don't wanna."

At a complete loss, Rose laid her hands on his face and tilted his head. She kissed him tenderly, wishing with all her might that she could just find a way to fix this.

The Doctor froze briefly and then, to Rose's absolute shock, slumped heavily in her arms.

* * *

She searched the room first but couldn't find his ship nor any sign of where he'd put it. She did find the sonic screwdriver in the pocket of his trousers but even then, he didn't wake up. They were running out of time.

"If I were you," she muttered to herself, "and I were bound and determined to get rid of myself and my ship, what would I do?"

The answer popped right into her head and with it a feeling of abject horror. He loved the 'Old Girl', for all that he resented her at the moment. He'd want her to go easily, do anything in his power to make it fast and gentle. So she'd be no farther than he absolutely had to put her from the original point of impact.

Right, and that was? Rose wracked her brain, trying to recall a long ago conversation which had mostly been Shireen talking and everyone else yelling "Shut up!" at random intervals. An obsession with Leonardo DiCaprio had led Shireen to an obsession with the movie, and then to the ship itself. She'd talked of nothing else for three days solid, at least, and Rose had been the only one to listen to her.

The ship had sailed on her maiden voyage on April 10th, and struck an iceberg on April 14th, 1912, which was today. More than half of the passengers and crew had died. It had been struck on... the starboard side... ("Right side, Shireen, right!"). But the hull hadn't given way or been stove in. Rather, there was a gash, and several cabins began to fill with water. One too many for the ship to stay above water, if Rose remembered correctly.

But that meant that the TARDIS was not below decks. She almost certainly had to be out on the main deck, right where the ice berg would hit, probably with the intention that she would topple over the side on impact and sink without a trace. The Doctor had probably planned to be with her, to say good bye.

That meant Rose would have to carry the Time Lord around in public in this state. But there was absolutely nothing else for it. He had to be saved today, and maybe talked out of it for several days, until he understood that although his world had died, he was not alone.

Rose had dragged grown men around before - it was an unfortunate side effect of working at Torchwood. But the Doctor outweighed her and was very nearly a foot taller besides.

Still, desperation. Humans could indulge in feats of extraordinary strength in moments of desperation, and she was desperate to get them both off this ship. The only thing she could do was try.


	7. Timing

I realize this update has taken approximately forever. However, to those still following along, I cannot express my gratitude enough, nor can I thank you enough for reading and reviewing. I promise I'm trying to keep everything going at once - which may be the problem. I've been aiming more for art but occasionally the best I can do is omelettes. I don't post those, so everyone's had to wait. Thanks to OV for the beta-reading and hand-holding. Yes, it is starting to feel like I'm writing a lot of this sort of stuff lately. Wonder why?

There IS plot in this chapter, but... -winks- Just say this chapter earns its rating. If that isn't your sort of thing... let me know.

* * *

**Relics of Eternity**

_Chapter 7: Timing_

When at last she flung the Doctor onto the bed in his room in the TARDIS, Rose collapsed on top of him, barely able to breathe. She'd ruined her clothes and his, no surprise there, even though she'd had some help getting him up the stairs. She felt very sorry for the friendly sailors who'd assisted her part of the way, but they didn't listen to her when she begged them to come with her. Not that she'd expected they would, and she'd had to drag him the rest of the way on her own. Still, to look at the marvelously miniscule bright side, they were both alive.

She couldn't believe how long the trek had been while dragging an unresponsive Time Lord. It had only taken moments for her to find the lounge with the bar, and then it had taken the Doctor only a few mind-numbing snogs to get her down into the depths of the ship, but every inch of the trip back onto the deck had felt like a mile. She'd just... catch her breath.

Rose didn't realize she'd fallen asleep until she felt an anxious prodding at the back of her skull, which she suspected came from the TARDIS. "All right, all right, I'm up," she muttered, and climbed off the unconscious Time Lord. He was completely unresponsive, but at least he was still breathing. His hearts were beating steady and strong in his chest. Rose had no idea why he was still asleep, but she decided she'd try to get cleaned up and patch herself back up, and then she'd see what she could do for him.

The TARDIS left night wear of Rose's own out in the en suite, though how she'd dragged it to present day from the future, Rose didn't want to know. She put it on after her shower and padded back to check on the Doctor.

He was still unconscious, so Rose decided to get him more comfortable. It wasn't like she'd never changed his clothes for him before, after all. Just... not this body. This was her first Doctor, the Doctor she'd first fallen in love with, the one who had haunted the fantasies of the end of her teenage years. Her childhood was well behind her now but, if anything, this body interested her more. She couldn't quite understand that, wasn't even sure if it was real or just that he was the Doctor and any Doctor was attractive to her at any time. All she knew for sure was that his clothes were filthy and disgusting and he was unconscious.

It wasn't like he went commando or anything. She knew that from the fact that she'd taken the leather jacket off him for the very last time and, more to the point, the jeans that went with it.

Resigned to trying everything to wake him as she went - which hadn't worked last time, but might this time as he wasn't regenerating or anything - she dragged off the one shoe that had made it all the way to the TARDIS with them. The coat, what was left of it, came off easily. The waistcoat gave her a little more trouble, so she ripped it the rest of the way - it was already torn from all the buttons popping off on their trip.

When she'd first seen him in this outfit today and remembered the pictures from before she'd started traveling with him, Rose had wondered why he didn't wear this suit when they met Charles Dickens. Now, as she straddled his waist and opened his cravat, the only intact article on him, she no longer had to wonder. She'd even managed to rip his silk shirt somehow, the yoke and sleeves separated, the buttons again missing. She undid his braces and stood up to chuck everything in the bin.

Rifling through his dresser drawer, she found the bottoms to the flannel jim-jams she remembered he'd favored in this incarnation. She also remembered - had never, ever been able to forget in fact - that most of the times she saw him in these trousers, the shirt was no where to be found. He'd never been best pleased about it when she'd caught him like that back then, mostly because she was meant to be asleep and he was doing something precious or daft or unlikely, any number of things that a man called "the Oncoming Storm" wouldn't want someone to know he did.

She dropped the jim-jams on the nightstand, took a deep breath and clinically and professionally opened the buttons on his trousers. He'd never asked her who changed his clothes at her mum's that one time, and he'd certainly never had any noticeable qualms about changing her clothes when she'd needed it. Of course, he was a doctor. She was...

She was the woman who loved him, who wanted him comfortable, and who still didn't know why he was asleep. With a resigned sigh, she tugged at the legs of his trousers.

Apparently the Doctor did go commando when it suited him.

_Fantastic_, Rose thought, and couldn't decide if she was being sarcastic or not. Flustered and self-conscious, she tried to ignore the view and finished her task (getting him naked, whispered a very evil little snickering voice in her subconscious).

Really, though, shoe sizes and everything, the view was only to be expected, she supposed.

Reaching hastily for the jim-jams with one hand, and the sheet with the other, Rose just glowered down into the Doctor's still face, as embarrassed as she could ever remember being. She was embarrassed for him, exposed like this when he had no idea what was going on, she was embarrassed for herself, for the whole unexpected naked Doctor thing, and she was completely ashamed of herself for all those very good reasons that she didn't want to examine too closely or she'd lose every trace of self-respect she'd ever had.

"I wish you'd wake up," she snapped crossly, dropping the sheet over him and giving his shoulder a shake. "Doctor, please wake up!"

Once before in her life, something like this had happened. She'd tucked the sonic screwdriver into the unconscious Doctor's hand, whispered, "Help me," into his ear, and watched him come alive with a vengeance for her sake. This time, he didn't spring up in her defense, he snatched her down with him instead. His reflexes hadn't been blunted in the slightest by his inexplicable nap. Simply, she had been standing next to him and then she was flat on her back, under him. Under the Doctor, the completely naked Doctor, who had been vigorously assaulting her senses since practically the second they'd spotted each other.

She didn't mean for him to wake right that second; why did timing hate her so much? It had taken her most of her last two minutes to tell him she loved him last time she saw him, so she would never know if he would have said it back. And now she was in serious trouble.

The Doctor's vivid blue eyes were blazing like a particularly colorful level of hell, but Rose couldn't tear her eyes away from him, not even to save her sanity, such as it was. She just met his gaze and loved him completely.

The fury in the Doctor's eyes went out even as they darkened to something familiar and just as frightening, but in a different way. Rose shivered. "You surprised me, there, precious girl," he murmured. "S'never safe ta go sneakin' up on old soldiers, ya know." His eyes got even darker as he took in her position and, apparently, became aware of his. "Specially when you've got them at a disadvantage."

Despite the strange warmth in his words, Rose expected him to start shouting at her, demanding explanations, possibly to call her a stupid ape. She winced and squeezed her eyes shut, didn't dare to move.

Maybe this was all in her head. That was the only possible explanation for something that should be positively wonderful trying to turn itself into something terrible. Maybe the frantic schedule she'd been indulging since Bad Wolf Bay had finally caught up to her and dropped her, unconscious, on the floor of her mum's hospital room.

"Rose." The Doctor murmured her name like a magic word, his voice caressing the single syllable in a way that turned it into treasure. "Look at me." His hand cupped her cheek, just like she remembered, just like he did not because it hadn't happened for him, not yet. Her eyes batted open, meeting him, not daring to hide anything from him.

"S'my favorite dream, this one. Only good dream I have, any more, bein' with you. Some times we jus' talk, an' you make me smile. Sometimes, we're runnin', like we did that night, remember?" He grinned and Rose couldn't help flashing back with him to that long sprint across the Thames, her normal life behind them, the London Eye ahead. "An' sometimes," he finished with a smirk, "I find meself in a right compromisin' position, like this one... an' we don't talk so much. What'd'ya think?"

Fighting tears, not even sure if they were joy or sorrow, Rose just shook her head. And nodded. And shook her head again, completely baffled and completely in love. She'd told herself she couldn't do this, shouldn't do it, that it was wrong. But what if she was wrong and this was actually right? What she felt for him went deeper than she'd ever have guessed, even back when she was traveling with him, when she'd known she would travel with him forever. It had taken standing on that damned autographed beach of hers to make her realize that he wasn't just a man she loved - he was the love of her life, the one true love like they talked about in fairy tales she'd never even believed in as a child.

There were millions upon millions of questions pounding in her simple human brain; there was hope and all the fires of the stars burning in his eyes. He needed her and she needed him; in this moment and in this place that was all that truly mattered. So she did the only thing she could do to make what she could of this odd sort of second chance - she curled her fingers in the back of his hair and pulled him down for a kiss.

Tenderness was lost almost immediately. Gentle, sweet, safe lovemaking was for sane, normal people whose love affair wasn't one grand and endless sweep of miscommunications and interruptions. Rose was half-mad, and the Doctor easily more than half. The kiss, therefore, was tongues and teeth and tearing cloth, writhing bodies and hands seeking skin as if touch was the only salvation for whole realities.

Rose was as naked as the Doctor before they ever broke apart, and she would never remember if she was the one who shredded her night shirt or if he did. She was almost certain he was the one who pulled off her knickers, but only almost. The sheet she'd covered the Doctor with was kicked out of the way, along with most of the rest of the bed clothes and then the moment seemed to freeze.

Maybe this was a dream after all. Despite the ferocity of their desire, maybe even because of it, there was something completely perfect about this, so perfect that it strained the bounds of credulity. Even caught in the hurricane torrent that they made for themselves, Rose was aware enough to realize that everything was too right between them, right enough to ruin her for any other lover, right enough to feel like they had been doing this her entire adult life. The Doctor knew exactly where and how to touch her and Rose found that she knew just where to touch him, too.

And then sensation overcame concentration, and they were swept up into the heart of the night. There was no free thought to wonder. There was only the thought to be lost in this moment forever. She had meant to be careful of him in his fragile state of mind and body, but it was as if there was a fever in her blood, a desperation only he could save.

She climbed up into his lap, needing to be as close to him as possible. His kisses were aggressive, against her skin and against her mouth. She kissed him just as fiercely, lapping greedily at the salt of his skin. Her teeth fastened into his shoulder as she wrapped her legs around his waist and rocked herself against the hardness of his body.

"That's right, love," the Doctor murmured, and bowed his head to return the gesture.

Rose didn't feel the pain. She knew she might later, but right now, she needed this to be real, and she needed to wear his mark, needed to mark him. She wanted him to claim her in every possible way. She wanted to keep this moment forever.

Rose listened to the Doctor murmuring soothingly, words of comfort and solace, words of pleasure and passion, words in English and, she supposed, Gallifreyan. She couldn't manage anything more than yes and please and quite a bit of calling out to him, as her Doctor and her deity.

He caught her eye and she nodded her head, ready for him in every possible way, if she hadn't been ready since the moment he took her hand. _These_ hands, the ones that parted her thighs, now, the long, slender fingers that stroked her right to the edge, the ones that were playing her body like they'd played that alien instrument in Van Statten's bunker.

Rose's body _sang_ when the Doctor entered her at last; she cried tears and joy as he began a rapid, plunging rhythm that drove him to the hilt inside her with every thrust. She met his desperation with her own, clung to him, hips driving hard to meet his every stroke. As if from an amazing distance, Rose heard her own voice, calling his name, "Doctor, my Doctor," but she was too caught up in the glory of possessing him and being his to care.

She locked her ankles around his waist, feeling the pressure building inside of her, but not able to even care about that. All she wanted was to be nearer to her Doctor, to keep him with her, in her arms, in this moment. Burning blue eyes locked with her own, an inferno of eternity swirling in the dark depths circled by a thin band of ice. Her nails raked across his back. Their lips fastened together, their bodies frantic with abandon.

The coil twisted tighter, until she felt like it couldn't possibly get any more tension. The ache clenched deeper, until it was pulsing at the same insane rhythm as her heart beat. Their movements became erratic, their gasping breaths catching with anticipation only to be driven just that little bit higher, deeper, farther.

Rose felt ambushed when her orgasm hit her at last and she didn't think she would ever remember what she said to him. She also didn't think he'd care, because he reached his own release right there with her. She knew that his name tumbled off her lips, knew he answered her with her own, in a voice like distant thunder.

The Doctor collapsed at her side, pulled her close, brushed away a wayward lock of hair that was sticking to her face. The word he said was alien and musical and it sounded like some sort of promise. Rose dared to mumble her truth into his shoulder as she rested her head against his chest and her heart inside his love.

He may or may not have heard her, but he didn't object and Rose looked up at him to check he was okay. He smiled serenely down at her, brushed a thumb across her lips. Then, just like a weary child's, his blue eyes batted closed and the Doctor slept naturally.

Time could go fuck itself. She was _never_ leaving him.


End file.
